is what i do

I’ve been busy.

I’ve hooked up with a group of folks in Cincinnati who are studying Buddhism, and we’ve organized ourselves as the Dharma Study Group. We’re reading and discussing the texts in the Pali Canon (the best collection in English translation is at the Access to Insight), and I’ve cobbled together a website to help us stay on track and focussed. I’m using TextPattern for the website, and so far, I’m impressed. It seems to be even more powerful than WordPress, which drives this blog, yet it’s pretty easy to understand and has a relatively intuitive UI for managing the site. Which is good, because the documentation, at this point in time, pretty much sucks. I’ll report back when I’ve had more experience with it.

I’ve also moved to a new hosting service, TextDrive, which is run by the same group of geeks responsible for creating TextPattern (note that TextPattern can run on just about any hosting service that offers PHP; it does not rely on any special capabilities of the TextDrive service). I’m not absolutely certain I did the smart thing here; the TextDrive servers are slow, compared to the SolidHost servers; the interface for managing the domains I have hosted there is plain and simple Webmin, as opposed to SolidHost’s elegant cPanel; and there have been several server crashes just in the few weeks I’ve had stuff on TextDrive. But their response has been excellent, their support smart and appropriate, and their drive to make it work is apparent. I think they will, and that I will be happy having made the switch. That said, I can’t recommend SolidHost too strongly; they’ve been a fantastic service and I’d go with them again in a heartbeat if I didn’t lust so foolishly and obsessively for geeky delights (e.g. Ruby, fastcgi installed, modPython installed, subversion, etc.)

I have seen some interesting stuff on the web over the past week, and I’ll compile a single portmanteau post to lay them all on you, sometime this evening or tomorrow. And, now that I’ve got dharmastudy.org up and running, I’m going to move back to the stuff I’ve been writing on belief; maybe a week or so on that.